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The lawsuit claims that prison officials disregard their own policy of providing individualized medical treatment, instead offering only hormone therapy, often in subtherapeutic doses “due to lack of monitoring, interruption and delay.”

“This is a greater threat now due to the vast amounts of subtherapeutic antibiotics that are used in concentrated animal-feeding operations.”

The penicillin- and tetracycline-based antibiotics at the center of NRDC’s analysis were approved for “non-therapeutic” or “subtherapeutic” uses, such as bolstering growth in animals or trying to prevent disease, typically among livestock living in cramped conditions.

“Farmers have been performing a great experiment for more than 60 years,” Blaser says, “by giving subtherapeutic doses of antibiotics to their animals to make them gain weight.”

"For over thirty years, the Agency has been confronted with evidence of the human health risks associated with the widespread subtherapeutic use of antibiotics in food-producing animals, and, despite a statutory mandate to ensure the safety of animal drugs, the Agency has done shockingly little to address these risks," Katz wrote.